Because ideas are property, don’t ya know.
The idiocy of owning ideas has now reached the point where BT is claiming that any developer who writes a program that looks up a user’s location in order to build a tailored list of menu options is in violation of this patent.
To wit, they have sued Google over nearly every service Google offers.
Of course, the goal is simply to extract as much money as possible from Google for no good reason. BT can’t compete in the market, so they use the State to rob their competitors.
The Verge reports:
British Telecommunications is the latest major company to sue Google over patents — it filed a lawsuit in Delaware last week alleging that nearly every Google product and service infringes at least one of six patents, including Google Search, Android, AdSense, Gmail, Google+, Google Docs, Google Music, and Google Maps. The patents themselves are all somewhat older, with some dating back to 1998, and they’re all quite broad — for example, #6,397,040 reads on nearly any service that uses your location to tailor a list of options or sources. That makes the case much, much bigger than any of the Android lawsuits we’ve seen previously, which, apart from the Oracle case, have almost all been directed at OEMs like Samsung and HTC; BT is going right after what it calls “ongoing and pervasive” patent infringement in Google’s core web products and services.
